begin quoting Gregory Ruiz-Ade as of Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 12:01:33AM -0800: [snip] > 6) easily merge maildir trees without overwriting or losing any > messages; merging multiple Maildir trees with rsync results in a union > of all those Maildir trees.
Ah, there's a good one I've not heard before. Most of my email is spread out on three machines, all different, among four mail clients. All the mail clients understand mbox; not all of the mail clients understand maildir. If they all understood maildir, it would make moving around mail SO much easier... > 7) restoring mail from backup, particularly after a partial loss (i.e., > "I deleted these seven very important emails from a client yesterday, > and didn't realize it until today") gets trivially easy, like #6, > above. After restoring the particular maildir folder in question, the > only remaining "damage" is that some deleted messages have returned. > Having had to do such a restore before with mbox files had me nearly > tearing my hair out trying to make sure I didn't screw something up. > And, believe it or not, this is a request that comes through a couple > times a year. Good bit. If I ever manage a mail-server again, that would be a key feaure indeed. I currently archive mboxes with gzip; it's simple, it's fast, it gets the job done -- however, it requires unique names so that gunzipping does the Right Thing. On the other hand, zcat works just fine for searching archived folders. Searching an archive .tgz folder would be problematic. > 8) Maildirs are ready-made for multiple, simultaneous access by client > programs. This is particularly handy when it comes to IMAP servers. > Personally, I frequently end up with mail clients running on two or > more machines (laptop, workstation at work, sometimes also webmail if > I'm testing something, etc.) and mbox-based IMAP servers > *cough*uwimap*cough* will kill any existing connections when a new one > is established, causing mail clients to disconnect and behave rudely. > Because of the complete lack of need for locking for Maildirs, there's > no need to enforce a one-at-a-time approach to access. I probably ought to use IMAP more, but I tend to store my mail locally. -Stewart "I could start mixing-and-matching, I suppose..." Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
